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Pain de Campagne

April 22, 2014 - 8:13am

Syd

Pain de Campagne

This is my version of Pain de Campagne. It took three attempts before I was satisfied with the result. The first two loaves were too sour for my liking. It was only when Josh suggested that I use more starter in my levain build, instead of less, that I finally got the result I wanted. :)

Levain

50g mature whole wheat starter

100g water

100g whole wheat flour

Allow to peak. Once it has peaked and started to recede, it will get more and more acidic. I wanted a young levain for this loaf so I used it when it reached its highest point. This took somewhere between four and five hours in my 28 degrees C kitchen. It had a nice fruity aroma and wasn't at all sour.

Main Dough

200g of the levain

350g water

50g rye

1/2 tsp diastatic malt

450g bread flour

Disperse the levain in the water with a wire whisk. I like to whisk it up until it has a good foam on top. Next, whisk in rye and malt powder. Then add bread flour with spatula and mix until all the flour has been moistened.

autolyse for 50 minutes

Then:

add 10g salt

knead to medium gluten development

Now:

bulk ferment for 1 hour with a turn at 30 minutes

Next:

pre-shape

rest 10 minutes

final shape

Put into well floured banneton and after about half an hour cover and:

retard for 12 hours in the fridge

Bake

at 230 C with steam for 15 minutes

Then:

reduce heat to 200 C and bake for a further 30 - 35 minutes

The proportionately large amount of levain in this recipe means that the dough develops really quickly hence the relatively short bulk fermentation time.

For the first two attempts I used smaller amounts of starter (30 and 20g respectively) and let the levain ripen for 12 hours. As Josh suggested, this made for a more sour levain. So more starter and a shorter ripening time is what he recommended. It worked really well and I am really pleased with the way this turned out.

I like adding all my whole wheat to the levain as I feel it gives it more 'wheaty' flavour. On the other hand, I don't like adding too much rye to the levain as it gets too sour too quickly.

The flavour of this bread improves with time and by day two (yesterday) it had a slight tang.

Personally, I prefer the darker bakes with a more wheaty flavour and a less pronounced sour but some of my bread eaters prefer it the other way round: lighter, thinner crusts and more sour. It just goes to show: you can't please everyone. :)

I'm in the midst of baking off my PDC re-do with the proper hydration (82%). That loaf looks stellar. it's actually just 16% pre-fermented flour which is pretty average. And 25% whole grain. Lovely crust and crumb.

First set of loaves is out of the oven and about to load some more. My dough is a bit different. It's 53% whole grain (43 wheat, 5 rye, 5 spelt) Along with fixing the hydration I opted to split the wheat half red wheat and half white wheat along with a 4 hour autolyse to balance the bite of the wheat/spelt. I'll post later.

Thanks for your advice Josh. :) I turned out just the way I like it. Not sure what the hydration of this loaf is. I haven't worked it out. It is more than 75% if you include the levain but the dough doesn't feel overly wet. It comes together quite quickly. How did you work out the percentage of prefermented flour? i would have thought it was 40%. (i.e. 200/500 * 100) or is that not how you work it out?

Looking forward to seeing your PDC's. Have never baked with spelt as I haven't been able to get my hands on it over here but would love to try some.

Josh, Thanks for working that out for me. I see how it works now. It is the amount of flour in the preferment as a percentage of the total flour. I was including the water in that equation. I like the way you laid it all out. Think I will use your method next time.

I lay out a formula but some consider the weight of levain to the weight of total flour. It's all relative I suppose. Some don't include the levain as part of the hydration/flour which confuses me but again just a different way to look at it.

I always add the flour and water from the seed starter in my calculations, so you would actually have 625 grams total flour and 475 grams water. Just curious why you don't include the seed starter in your calculations.

Josh is correct. I only used 200 g of the leaven in my final dough. So the 50 g from the seed starter was effectively removed. However, I didn't use it to keep as my mother dough, I just discarded it. I keep my starter separate from my leaven. It's for insurance reasons. :) What if the cat knocked over the entire bowl of leaven and it was all soiled? Or some other unforeseeable disaster? It would mean that I would have to make a new starter all over again. In fact I have two jars of starter that I keep in the fridge. Although they are fed slightly differently, if something terrible happened to one, I would still have the remaining one from which I could build again.

in your crust. I can just hear the bread sing. I am definitely going to try out your formula for PDC. I am always trying for more sour in my breads so I plan to do all the things you mentioned but the opposite. :)

Yes, it did take a fair amount of obsessing! Fortunately, it wasn't that much work, though. I knew from the outset the flour percentages and recipe proportions that I wanted. The only thing that changed was the method of the levain build. However, I did reduce the amount of malt from 1 tsp to 1/2 tsp. 1 tsp was bordering on the crumb being a little gummy.

Well, yes, those are my personal feelings. Not sure how scientific they are though! :) Would love to hear other's opinions. There was a lot of flavour in the raw dough of this loaf. It didn't really need the 12 hour retard and could have been baked after a second rise at room temp. or a shorter retard. In fact, for the first two versions, I only retarded for six hours because I thought they were going to collapse on me. I did leave them out longer before retarding though. I think I left them out for more than an hour.

What a beautiful loaf. I love the scoring and how evenly the loaf 'sprang' in the oven….and then the dark crust that would make my neighbor drool. She loves boldly baked loaves and is the one who educated me about their merits.

It did take three attempts. Although outwardly the loaf didn't change much, the third attempt was the least sour and the darkest bake. I find if I change to convection after finishing the steaming part of the bake, I get a darker crust.

Will definitely be making this one again. The amount of dough it makes (slightly over 1kg) makes for one large boule that lasts about four days. That means if I bake on Sunday, I have bread for most of the week. Larger boules seem to keep better than smaller loaves. They don't dry out so quickly.

Hope things are going well with preparations for your next market day,

That's a real beauty you baked there. Your crust color is consistent with what I got and so is the crumb. I am sure there is a lot of flavour in that crust of yours. What did it taste like? Thanks for posting Phyllis.

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